Night Owl Cards

(Woo-boy, I haven't done one of these since April??? I need to pick up the pace or we're never going to get anybody else in the Cardboard Appreciation Hall of Fame and people will start showing up at my home with pitchforks. It's finally time for Cardboard Appreciation again. This is the 322nd in a series).  In an earlier post, I mentioned that post-career Steve Garvey cards can be a little tricky to acquire and I was determined to make sure that the latest readily available one would not elude me for too long. So I landed this Heritage insert before I even finished the Dodgers Heritage team set (last card on its way to me as I write), which is not the usual way. It's a great card and now that Heritage is covering the 1970s, suddenly all these Baseball Flashbacks are like the most interesting part of Heritage for me. I usually pay them almost no mind -- now I want them ALL!   But one card at a time. This magnificent picture shows Garvey accepting his All-Star Game MVP t...

I received an interesting question from Mark of the blog Mark's Ephemera yesterday. He was wondering if there has ever been a subset of any kind, issued in a mainstream set, of all of the baseball commissioners. I already knew the answer to this was "no," but I did some brief scoping and still came up with "no." The baseball card world just doesn't care about commissioners. Never has. In almost every case, only exceptional circumstances has allowed a commissioner to appear in a major baseball card set. In the case of A. Bartlett Giamatti here, commissioner No. 7, the poor guy had to die before he received a card. It hasn't been as dire for the other commissioners, but good luck finding a card of some of them. Perhaps the commissioner with the most luck getting his face on cards is Ford Frick, the third baseball commissioner, who ran the majors from 1951-65. His reign coincided with the boom in baseball cards, and in 1959, Topps made Fric...